Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

How do!

Fresh from yet another wibbling rant about the state of Chaos, I bring you this thread. And it’s dedicated to enabling a more background accurate representation of Chaos. But, and here’s the important bit, without changing the existing Codexes one bit. And it’s drawing on an old WHFB list selection method.

See, once upon a time, probably my favourite period of WHFB, Chaos broke the mould when it came to army selection. Rather than representing a formal army, this was intended to reflect a given Chaos force being comprised of smaller warbands, temporarily allied in pursuit of a common goal.

What you did was first pick, arm and pay for a Chaos Champion. Then, you had to purchase units of at least equal value. That was their bondsmen/warband. Then rinse and repeat until you’ve spent all your points.

So…why not allow a 40K Soup List on the same lines? Pick a Codex. Pick and pay for a Champion type, then spend at least that many points, from the same Codex, to provide them with Their Dudes. Then do it again and again, picking and choosing from the various Codexes on offer, until all your points are spent.

Oh there’s nothing stopping you picking from a single Codex with its usual restrictions. And Chaos Knights can be Dreadbladed in exactly as is.

Then? Points not withstanding of course, you can have a wild assortment of Chaos forces marching under a single banner.

Perhaps require that 25% be spent on your High Heedyin And Hims Dudes, to represent the chap currently wielding the most influence.

But let Chaos be Chaotic.

I fully agree and it's a great way to make a really striking chaos force. It's how I think of my chaos armies - this is the nurgle warband, here's their temporary word bearer allies and their cultists, and then here's the daemons they've summoned lead by daemon champions.

I fear the problem (as ever) with that style of army building is that a bunch of Even Sadder Young and Old Gits on the internet will crunch the numbers and figure out "the best" configuration for warbands and then it'll get published on the internet and that's all you'll ever see, along with posts where people say "Is X warband VIABLE?!?"

But perhaps I'm too cynical, and if GW really want to promote narrative play, I can't think of a better way than with more narrative force building.

Not daft at all, rather like it!

Do you think it might need some Character restriction, to stop Big Lord Spam/Daemon Prince Spam?

Perhaps simply a Keyword of “Primacy” or similar, with only one such Character being permitted in such a soup list?

As for people number crunching? They do that anyway. All that changes is what boring looks like. I’ve long maintained that Boring People Making Boring Lists shouldn’t mean interesting lists should be prevented.

ok but where does the actual chaos come into it? like the mutations and gifts and daemons and things? what you've described is just picking a bunch of heroes and units from other armies and smooshing them together, kind of like the old Imperial Soup armies, or Crusade forces

I like a system akin to the 2nd edition Chaos codex: You take your core army from the Chaos Codex, and you CAN take units from other armies but you pay a premium for them (In 2nd edition it was specifically the Ultramarines codex and you paid +25% to represent "post-heresy equipment" but I don't see why it couldn't apply to other armies)

I would mix in some of the 3rd edition daemonhunters Adversaries rules

So a slight points bump + chaos options is how I'd do it, with some exceptions (No Chaos Custodes or Grey Knights, for example), possibly with a mandatory character + Battleline unit before you get to pick anything else from that codex (So no Chaos Hammerheads on their own alongside an Iron Warriors army)

This way a chaos force isn't just a carbon copy of the base force (if you choose to have your whole force from another codex), but you can do both a soup army and a pure force.

So for example you could have:
- Normal Chaos army, all units from the Chaos Codex, no corrupted units
- Partially corrupted force: Warlord and most units from the Chaos Codex, but you can have a small contingent of Chaos Orks with a Mek, Boyz and a Battlewagon.
- Soup army: a whole bunch of different forces together in service of the Dark Gods
- Fully corrupted force: whole army taken from another codex, but costs more and has some Chaos upgrades to represent their corrupted nature

It comes from the wide range of possible combinations. Showing that even at the best of times? Chaos forces are still Cults of Personality, with a Champion gathering followers under their unique banner. That even the Legions don’t necessarily fight as a single entity with pre-agreed goals.

In your minds eye, the concept of such an army may be Reavers, United for this attack and this attack alone, with the promise of greater spoils as a result. Or it’s a snapshot of a wider warzone, with representatives from larger forces converging and competing. And indeed a bunch of other things.

It is chaos in its rawest, least organised form. And importantly? By no means replaces selecting from a single Codex if that’s your bag.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
To help avoid people just fielding Special Characters? Have a Prime Detachment or whatever, where a single character with the Unique Keyword is allowed. And that’s it.

So you could have say, Kharn the Betrayer leading the main force. But couldn’t then support him with Lucius or Typhus or Ahriman etc.

I mean, I wouldn’t mind fighting such an army once in a while (think of the bragging rights!), but such a restriction would prevent overly boring spam.

It’s about giving Chaos Players greater agency to play the faction their way.

At the risk of being a party pooper, I don't think I'd like this.

My first thought is the issue brought up by Da Boss: it would be very easy/tempting for people to just treat this as a way to field the most points efficient units in the game together again. Basically bringing back whatever the modern equivalent of riptides backed up by scatbikes is. We can say, "boring people make boring lists," but I think this is the sort of thing that would happen on a spectrum. If you give someone the option to cherry pick their favorite units from across the game, it's going to be tempting to do so, at least a little.

Kind of impossible to balance.

But even setting balance aside, I'm not sure I'd like what this would do for the fluff/theming/playstyle of armies. It wouldn't read as "chaotic" to me so much as it would read as a "themeless hodgepodge" of whatever armies the player happens to have access to.

Tau, orks, and chaos marines in the same army doesn't really read as an assemblage of chaos warbands and/or their mercenaries, or whatever. It reads as a bunch of random armies thrown in a blender.

Part of this might just be that 40k battles aren't actually big enough to convey the idea that you're going for? Like, if I saw 5k points of chaos marines with 1k of kroot on the left flank and 1k of drukhari on the right flank, *that* would kind of read as a chaos army with some xenos mercs getting in on the action. But a 1k chaos marine army with 500 points of kroot and 500 points of drukhari doesn't read the same way to me. At that point, it just kind of feels like chaos marines have access to xenos units.

The armies involved also wouldn't feel particularly chaos-corrupted to me. Like, tau units continuing to be all about supporting eachother and staying out of melee and using clean and shiny tech is just going to feel like normal tau; not chaos tau. And if someone actually wanted something like a chaos ork or chaos tau army, I'd think they'd prefer an approach that actually gives them rules and options for showing what that would look like.

One of my own WIP armies is a chaos cult army. It uses mostly chaos models but GSC rules. So my neophytes are cultists, my genestealers are daemonettes/bloodletters, etc. The GSC rules happen to hit the notes I wanted from a (usually Alpha Legion) chaos cult, using trickery and a few horrific melee monsters to overcome a more conventionally powerful enemy.

But if I wanted more official support for a chaos cult army from GW, I wouldn't just want them to let me cherry pick a few GSC units; I'd want something closer to the brood brother rules or day of ascension rules where I get strats and enhancements and so forth that tell a story through how the disparate elements of the army interact. Assuming that a proper codex or supplement or whatever isn't on the table.

Well boy do I have news for you, after I get done with the 3e battle bible, I have a really cool chaos codex idea I am going to make for 40k 3e that includes chaos space marines, chaos deamons, chaos beastmen, chaos/renegade guard, lost and damned, minotaurs, dragon ogres, zombies/skeletons, chaos squats, chaos eldar, chaos androids, chaos orks.

I'm taking heavy influence from the RT era "realms of chaos" books, the 2e chaos codex, the 3e chaos codex's, and the chaos daemons codex.

A literal chaos tapas as that one youtuber says.

 Da Boss wrote:
I fully agree and it's a great way to make a really striking chaos force. It's how I think of my chaos armies - this is the nurgle warband, here's their temporary word bearer allies and their cultists, and then here's the daemons they've summoned lead by daemon champions.

I fear the problem (as ever) with that style of army building is that a bunch of Even Sadder Young and Old Gits on the internet will crunch the numbers and figure out "the best" configuration for warbands and then it'll get published on the internet and that's all you'll ever see, along with posts where people say "Is X warband VIABLE?!?"

But perhaps I'm too cynical, and if GW really want to promote narrative play, I can't think of a better way than with more narrative force building.

Nah, you're on the money. I don't think this level of fun is something the community can be trusted with. Someone must beat them on the knuckles regularly with a ruler.

Worth noting that while its probably not a great idea from a rules perspective, you can probably get away with it just fine with the proper conversions and paint schemes.

Like the recent Mandalorian army they teased for Legion is a great example of how Chaos could be painted. They've effectively made an army of unique looking models out of like 5 sculpts almost entirely by how they painted them.

The biggest issue I foresee is the unbearable lack of balance this would cause. When you can choose from anything across 5 Codexes, your army won't have any weaknesses.

The Path To Glory rules from the Realms of Chaos books are played more like Necromunda or Warcry, where it's strongly suggested that a Game Master is elected to help balance the armies and scenarios so that one player doesn't steamroll everyone.
That ain't gonna happen for random pick-up games down the local gaming club.

As someone who had a friend make their own "Codex" where they just picked all the units they liked from all the Space Marine factions and merged them, let me tell you it is not a fun experience.

8th edition chaos with the editions detachment system was pretty much just that.

I took a thousand sons / slaanesh alpha legion force out a few times - on the one hand it was as absurdly cherry-picked as you'd expect, on the other hand it would have been somewhat less abusive without 8ths highly permissive mixing of bonuses (that led to things like the loyal 32).


Some versions of oldhammer had active disadvantages for mixing - i'll have to dig out my old epic chaos book as combined forces were a necessity.